Circuits of Children’s Testimony: Reading Syrian Children’s Drawings of Home

ABSTRACT

In this article, we discuss Ben Quilty’s Home: Drawings by Syrian Children (2018) as a case study that explores how we might approach children’s life narratives that are mediated by adult curators. Children’s lives and stories demand recognition, but, reading them (within scholarly and activist or benevolent spaces), requires ethical methods; in particular, generous reading frameworks that attempt to read ‘through’ mediation, and beyond adult/child binaries, towards a greater recognition of the contexts that the child life narrators (in this instance, as artists) ask us to attend to. As we analyse a selection of the children’s drawings in Home, we ask, to what extent do these children’s life narratives, of explicitly interior lives, usefully test the limits of Quilty’s and other levels of mediation?

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee
• life writing
• drawing
• children’s testimony

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Kylie Cardell is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University, South Australia. She is the author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary (2014), and editor (with Kate Douglas) of Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth (2015). Kylie is an executive member for the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) Asia-Pacific, co-directs the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group (Flinders University), and is the Essays Editor for Life Writing.

Kate Douglas is a Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University. She is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (Rutgers, 2010) and the co-author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (Palgrave, 2016; with Anna Poletti). She is the co-editor (with Laurie McNeill) of Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (Routledge 2017), (with Kylie Cardell) of Trauma Tales: Auto/biographies of Childhood and Youth (Routledge 2014) and (with Gillian Whitlock) Trauma Texts (Routledge, 2009). Kate is the Head of the Steering committee for the International Auto/Biography Association’s Asia-Pacific chapter.

Notes

1 See, for example, Brigid Delaney’s (2019) feature on Quilty which addresses the conflicting way his image has circulated within the Australian media, including, as a ‘messiah’ figure.

2 For example, on her blog Design for Good, London based designer and researcher Ipek Altunmaral documents a 2016 drawing workshop she designed and ran for Syrian children at a Turkish refugee camp; a similar project by artist and photographer David Gross (2016) has been running since 2013. ‘Inside-Outside’ seeks to ‘document what it means to be a refugee child on the move’, curating and exhibiting online artworks produced through workshops and showcasing artistic photographic portraits of child refugees (http://insideoutsideproject.org/).

3 As Tomsic states, ‘The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported at the end of 2016, there were 65.6 million forcibly displaced people world-wide and fifty-one per cent of those were under eighteen years of age.’ (2019, 138–139).

4 For instance, in Darfur children’s drawings have been used as legal testimony: ‘In 2007, children’s images entered into a legal forum when the nongovernmental (NGO) Waging Peace submitted five hundred drawings to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. For the first time in history, children’s drawings were recognized as evidence in international law’ (Farley and Tarc 2014, 836).

5 Quilty also asserts the value of children’s narratives as ‘conversion narratives’ for adult readers – potentially didactic or instructive for adults who might otherwise resist empathy. In his conversation with Lisa Slade he asserted: ‘You kill racism by sitting with a child’. While this raises larger questions (perhaps for another paper), this statement places significant weight on children’s drawings and children’s testimony to enact personal and political change. This statement also assumes the children’s experiences and perspectives exist in binary opposition to adult narratives, generally. As we have argued elsewhere in this paper, we are arguing for a more nuanced reading of children’s texts for their complexity and diversity, that considers the contexts that the children themselves provide to readers and including their aesthetic choices.

6 Quilty acknowledged that some drawings revealed signs of PTSD; Quilty always asked for help, but help wasn’t always available (‘In conversation’). When Quilty wasn’t present, children could write their name and description of the picture on the back of the paper if they wanted to. In Home, some of the pictures are unattributed. Although drawing is a means for documenting experience, it also puts the children at risk. Coloured pencils were banned by ISIS (‘In conversation’). Quilty explains: ‘There were some places, like northern Iraq, where it was physically impossible to get materials in … We did get drawings out, but they were literally smuggled out, because the parents were terrified that if ISIS found coloured pencil drawings, retribution would be swift and horrific’ (Quilty in Wallace). This context for the project is further explained in a Note for the Acknowledgements section of Home (303).

7 Significantly, some of the drawings lack biographical information: Quilty explains in a note that in certain cases, the risk for identifying the child and their family was too high: ‘they were overwhelmingly enthusiastic share their stories with the world though not all were confident to share their names for fear of retribution’ (2018, 303).

8 It might seem an obvious observation to make, but in some of these drawings it is difficult to work out what the picture is representing. This is not uncommon in children’s drawings more generally. Our interpretations reflect a method that we want to explore and critique as we use it. And this is central to our argument that we want the artist to reveal a text and contexts to us, and we will do our best to read logically and generously.